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Patrice Greanville, Editor & Publisher

Rowan Wolf, Emeritus Managing Editor
Ed Duvin, Editor at Large (All topics)
Gaither Stewart, Senior Editor / Special Foreign Correspondent (Rome-Paris)
Steven Jonas, Senior Editor (Politics & Culture)
Sean Lenihan, Associate Editor (Admin, Politics, Economics)
Branford Perry, Associate Editor & Network Rels (Politics, History, Literary); editor of Branford Perry’s Hipokrisy.net; social media
Paul Carline, Assistant Editor (Politics, History, Terrorism, False Flag Ops, Media)
Roland Windsor Vincent, Special Editor (Socialism & Ecoanimal Struggle)

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS
Andre Vltchek, Politics, Culture, History, Revolutionary Arts
Crista Priscilla, Politics, Culture, History, Revolutionary Arts

•••

Joe Bageant, † Associate Editor Emeritus (1946-2011)

•••

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Anthony Marr, Science & Ecoanimal Issues Editor
Stephen Lendman, Senior Editor, Politics & Economics
Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, Special Editor (Tantmieux)

Bill Blum, Special Editor, US Foreign Policy
Kristine Mattis, Politics & Current Affairs
Shorty Williams, Society, Culture
Michael Faulkner, Politics, History, Current Events
William Hathaway, Culture, Politics, History, Military
Perry Miller, Politics, Cultural Affairs

 

••••

Margo Stiles, Business Manager
Angela Swann, Design Consultant
Please send all correspondence to the editors in the care of Margo Stiles, who will forward the message(s) to the corresponding editor(s):  margostiles@greanvillepost.com

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Opinions expressed in these pages do not necessarily reflect the position of The Greanville Post, its editors, or Greanville Publishing, LLC.




POSSIBILITY, PROBABILITY OF NUKING IRAN

The odds are always good that men in power will do evil things because there’s an established evil side to the human personality, especially when men are defending privileges.

OpEd By Gaither Stewart

When he began his climb Hitler was facing almost impossible odds, or was he?

(Rome) By pure chance two encounters occurred simultaneously: I read a reference to Aristotle’s discussion of possibility and probability in M.H. Abrams’ book, The Mirror and the Lamp, and, on the same day, several press articles concerning the U.S. threat to “pull the trigger” on Iran.

[print_link]

Liberals who continue their love affair with President Obama and refuse to believe the probability of a U.S attack on Iran, who think widespread torture by the USA unlikely and reject outright the mere idea that the USA is or is becoming  a fascist nation would do well to read up on the subject of probability-possibility.

The question belongs to philosophy, yes, and to history, yes. But it’s an eye opener in our comprehension and evaluation of daily news feeds and the shortcomings of the mainline press, i.e. what the press doesn’t tell us or what it chooses to tell us.

No one understands for sure what probability means. Mathematicians and statisticians have many complex theories but they really don’t know. Some people consider probability merely a feeling or a hunch, an expression of something that might or might not happen. In fact, probability is nothing more than the measure of the possibility that an event will occur. We see it in police films, the decisive probability that fingerprints or dna match.

However, since apparent impossibilities do sometimes happen, another approach is to distinguish probability between possibility and plausibility, concentrating on the terrifying consequences if the improbable does occur. Please keep Iran in mind here.

True and admittedly, just because a thing is possible does not have to mean it is necessarily probable. Yet, in the example of the USA today we have the following factors to deal with: American possession of a huge nuclear stockpile and the possibility–capacity to deliver an atomic bomb wherever it desires–combined with the unknown X factor of the nature of man. So what might seem improbable because of its very enormity—i.e. nuking the ancient country of Iran—is possible.

For improbabilities after all do occur and man has an evil side. Back in 1919, a former semi-drifter and police spy known as Adolf Hitler had just joined the ludicrously small DAP (German Workers Party). Could anyone say at that point that Hitler’s probability of becoming master and scourge of Europe in less than 15 years was very high?

I recall vividly arguments before Vietnam with two close friends who maintained that America could never in any case commit the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. That despite the fact we had already dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. That was however before napalming Southeast Asia, unleashing wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and waterboarding in Guantanamo and elsewhere (we waterboarded routinely and without much media clamor in Indochina, too).

So we know that under certain conditions and in a certain environment man is capable of almost any act. Man can be peace-loving and warlike at the same time. Depending on his culture and ethic and environment and the relatively unchanging nature of man,  each characteristic is both possible and probable.

Which completes the circle. We are drawn back to the lodestone of the socio-political question. To the struggle that has gone on since private property and class division emerged in ancient societies. We all know, or should know, by now, this old story. The proprietor-capitalist lords it over the wage earner working man who in the end must rebel. The capitalist does not change. And is capable of any act he can get away with. He can torture or nuke as he pleases. Each according to his own nature within the realm of possibility the most abominable improbability, the political leadership makes the decision to nuke A or B country, intellectuals justify the decision ethically, and the military and police execute it. The fact that a hostile odious act is possible is taken as ethical justification of the event.

Senior Editor GAITHER STEWART is also The Greanville Post / Cyrano’s Journal Online European correspondent, based in Rome.




Riffs On A Good Read

While television sinks ever deeper into crass irrelevance, the printed word holds its own, and finds ultimate freedom and redemption on the Internet.

By Case Wagenvoord

Dateline: 03 February, 2010 / Crossposted with Countercurrents.org [print_link]

A good article is one that is covered with margin notes when it is finished. Gaither Stewart’s “Symbolism, Ideology and Revolution” is such an article. I’d highly recommend taking the time to read the entire piece. That being said, let me begin to quote and riff. Stewart quotes Umberto Eco who argues that:

“[S]ociety…has become a universe devoid of a center. Everything is periphery. There is no longer a heart of anything.”

What we have instead are faux power centers that are more media creations than reality. It is obvious that it has been decades since any presidents of the United States, including Obama, actually ran the country. What the media calls the most powerful man in the world is little more than a shill for the special-interest lobbyists who are the real power. And, as Eco noted, there is no center, no heart through which a sword could be plunged. Rather there is only a toxic mist made up of many discrete particulates that drift across the land, constantly changing shape as it moves.

Eco goes on to say:

“Power is multiple and ubiquitous. It is a network of consensuses that depart from below. Power is plurality. Power is the multiplicity of relationships of strength.”

The habituated momentum that makes up a society and keeps power in its place also hollows a society out as the ideals and ideology that set this momentum into motion gradually fades from memory until only a fragile ideological construct is left that slowly becomes a parody of itself. We see this in the desperation with which our oligarchs cling to their belief in a self-regulating free market, which is little more than an empty ideological shell staggering under the weight of a global economic meltdown brought about by a “free market” run amok.

Power is neither rational nor planned. It is a haphazard convergence of interests by those with the resources to implement them.

“Liberals can take strong stands on minor community improvements; they can work themselves into a fury and campaign relentlessly and join sit-ins and carry placards concerning, let’s say, how the local school yard is to be used on weekends or about alternate days for trash pickup, and still ignore the concept of social justice for all. Viewed from a distance, I therefore am dubious about so-called grassroots activities: naturally they are welcome, but I suspect in the long run harmless. No wonder Power as a rule lets them sit-in, sit-out, march and carry little placards. Liberals, at the most, only potentially revolutionary, are Power’s ally and stand in the way of drastic social change.”

Stewart comments that one “notes little solidarity between the middle-class and the poor.”

This points to the paradox of class in the United States. Because we cling to the belief that we are a classless society, we find ourselves mired in class prejudice. The reason is simple: Our “classlessness” is based on the unspoken assumption that everyone, by nature, should be middle-class, and those who are not appropriately dressed, well behaved, polite, orderly, law abiding and socialized in accordance with Euromerican standards is marginalized.

The American left castrated itself in the 60s when it turned its back on blue-collar America, and, in doing so, lost its base. It has been impotent ever since. As a result, blue-collar America voted for Reagan who proceeded to screw them to the wall.

Speaking of the European bourgeoisie, Stewart says, “Within that class emerge the thinking and movements for drastic social change.”

This hints at a major difference between Europe and America. Europe has a history of vibrant social thought that reached down to all social classes. America has no such tradition. This is because we are a nation of technicians, not poets. For example, the mantras I grew up with were: “Say what you mean!” “Get to the point!” “Don’t beat around the bush!” In other words, we are conditioned to believe that there can only be one meaning for each word. Consequently, our language lacks depth, nuance and metaphor, without which there can be no poetry and damn little imagination. And an ideology that lacks both poetry and imagination is a flattened balloon. (This is why America is so flush with Fundamentalists, and why, if you scratch our atheists you find a gaggle of pissed-off Fundamentalists.)

“Lionel Trilling defined middle class in relations to the government. From the ruling or governing class one scales down to the lowest classes which are cut out totally from any relation with the government. The middle class, situated midway between these two, continues to believe—in its overwhelming false consciousness—that government exists for it and for its interests.” (In other words, the American Dream is a middle-class gig.)

However, now that the impoverishment of the middle-class is underway, it will be interesting to see how it develops. Stewart contends that, “…the major target for proponents of radical change should be precisely those deaf and dumb, ignorant and obtuse, super patriotic middle classes.” In other words, the left should take a good hard look to see what it has in common with the tea baggers. A crucial component of solidarity is listening.

Unfortunately, the middle-class has always wanted reform, but not too much reform. The reform it seeks cautiously sidesteps the structural and systemic changes that would be necessary to evolve into a truly decent society instead of the dog-eat-dog kennel we have become.

As Stewart notes about Liberals:

Speaking of artists, Stewart argues that, “To write propaganda or paint conformist art is to succumb to the allures and/or coercion of the reigning system. For that reason most artists are countercurrent. The is also why artists should stay away from the White House or the Elysee Palace.” (And avoid grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

However, I must disagree with Stewart over how “countercurrent” our artists are. Art seems to have been reduced to arcane installations viewed only by the “creative clique” that clusters around the trendy galleries in the country’s metropolitan centers, and what passes for contemporary literature is so much mind-numbing navel gazing.

Articles like Stewart’s are why I prefer reading to television (this from a recovering television addict). The tube deadens while the printed page stimulates. The tube produces consumers while the printed page produces citizens. Perhaps that is why there are so few citizens in the United States.

Case Wagenvoord blogs athttp://belacquajones.blogspot.com and welcomes comments at Wagenvoord@msn.com.




IN SEARCH OF MEXICO: Latin America’s enigma (Part I)

Who are these Mexicans who disturb the tranquility of the USA enough to necessitate a wall to separate the two North American peoples? Who are literally “dying” to get into fortress USA? What is their country like that they so readily abandon in order to work in Yankee supermarkets and California orchards, on New York skyscrapers and in households of the Atlantic seaboard? How is it possible that these two neighboring peoples are so dramatically different one from the other? In this essay I offer some personal answers. Image: General Villa, Commander of the División del Norte, meets with General Pershing.

Gen. of the Northern Armies Francisco Villa (Center) in a rare photo with US Gen. Pershing.

GAITHER STEWART [print_link] PART ONE  |  READ PART TWO

THE FIFTEEN MONTHS I SPENT IN MEXICO deepened and consolidated a fundamental transformation long underway in me. The Italian writer Ignazio Silone was right: I had to step backwards from what I once was and where I was before in order to see myself and the world. Or maybe it was simply the altitude of Mesoamerica … and the winds … and also new inclinations toward unrestraint. Or maybe what happened to me in Mexico was simply because it is not necessary to live south of the border very long in order to begin to see American imperialism at work, contributing to the existing economic disparity between north and south. It is a mystery why things are the way they are. Still, it became clear that powerful evil forces combine to compel millions of Mexicans to sneak into the United States and live a dog’s life just to eat. Though it is true that because of the missing social idea America’s poor are poorer than Europe’s poor, Mexico’s poor are still worse off. Their poverty makes them seem to grovel for sustenance. Most certainly Mexicans don’t work on the skyscrapers of Dallas and New York City and wash dishes in cafeterias in Atlanta and in Charlotte and pick fruit in California because they are enamored with Yankee life. They prefer Mexico. They are north of the formidable Rio Grande border with its growing wall for the simple reason that though man does not live by bread alone, he must eat. For anyone with eyes to see it is clear that something is startlingly and tragically out of whack in North America.

Contrary to what some smug bien-pensants pseudo-sociologists and self-righteous capitalists pontificate, Mexicans do not choose to be poor. Otherwise why the perilous nocturnal crossings over the Rio Grande, risking drowning, betrayals by the same bandits who organize their passage, beatings and arrest by the Texas Rangers, and being shot down by military reservists along America’s Berlin style Wall—a Wall to keep Mexicans out, they say, but soon, who can say for sure? maybe also to keep Americans in.

At the same time American financiers and industrialists in Mexico were gaining influence in Central America and the Caribbean, and participated with their British partners in expansion into South America, Africa and Asia. (A fine old tradition, British and American cooperation: one people, one empire!) Thus, when the Mexican Revolution exploded the people’s ire was directed against both the Diaz regime and foreign capitalists—chiefly Americans. Shouts of “Long Live Mexico” and “Death to the Yankees” are echoed today in similar protests ringing out from Afghanistan to Africa to the Middle East. Mexican rioters then attacked American targets as do Islamic terrorists today. When the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata proclaimed that the rich of Mexico City treated their horses better than the people, he attracted poor peasants from all over Mexico. No wonder the Mexican government has never ceased to fear the Zapatistas, as the movement for “tierra y libertad” (land and freedom) is still called today, and who periodically march on the capital to demand their rights.

Empire and Revolution shows how American-Mexican relations anticipated the issue of globalization that emerged in the 1990s. Now globalization, the division of wealth and the economic disparity between the United States and the Third World are sharpening the conflictual relationship between the rich and the poor worlds in general.

Bluish-black mountains filled the triangular plateau to form a gigantic pyramid surrounded by the seas. It was the top of the world, the center, where time stands still. In the vacuum you feel a sensation of enormous power. Finally, under the last layer of smog and mist, the sun was hazy and matted. A buoyant voice concealing a note of irony announced that we might see the pyramids as we flew over the city.

No such luck. No signs of pyramids. Only smog.

And, on the ground, the long dreamlike black and yellow airport corridors leading into the New-Old World generated simultaneous sensations of challenge and hesitation.

I must have been looking for the comfortable old city I had visited decades earlier. It was nothing of the sort. Though Mexico City seemed familiar, it was another world from what I remembered. The rhythm had changed—the traffic, the noises, the masses on the streets, the way people moved, the park of the Alamos, the arcades, the sudden vistas, the Italian style palazzos. Still, though it was the Old World located in the New World, there was something there I didn’t feel before. The city had something universal about it absent in ephemeral Detroit, something it would never occur to any sane person to search for in the city of the automobile.

Since we both felt immediately at home, Milena and I quickly concluded that the Mexican is nonetheless more European. On the other hand, the Mexican nature also makes one wonder if it is positive to be so universal that you can accept anything philosophically? For universality has not brought great fortune to Mexico, no more than has its proximity to the USA. It seems only ancient peoples like perhaps Sicilians or Sardinians are capable of being simply men. Men who don’t strive for perfection. It came to seem to me that men who just lead good lives are perhaps universal without realizing it. It makes them free, but at the same time vulnerable to the claws of the hawks.

Most of all I wanted to know who these Mexicans are who make this another world from the rest of North America. In his El Laberinto de la Soledad, Octavio Paz explains that just as behind the Greeks stood the Egyptians or behind the Romans stood the Etruscans or behind the Russians, the Varangians and Mongols, behind the Aztecs and the Spanish conquerors who formed today’s Mexicans there stand millennia of peoples in a long and crazy past. In the end I came to see Mexico as a tragic country. It has do with its ancient origins. Or its solitude on its highlands and in its jungles. Rich in an ancient culture and, as you see on Mexico City’s eighty-kilometer long Avenida Insurgentes, at the vanguard of modernity, Mexico is a political caveman. A modern dictatorship based on corruption and retention of power. But somehow—my hope is that some of the reasons become clear in this writing—it is not decadent as were the Aztecs by the time the Spanish arrived. I see Mexico as a viable society, on its way up. While the United States has passed its zenith, Mexico can still rise again.

Most everything that reflects Mexico happens in its capital city of between twenty-two and thirty million people—no one knows how many since its uncounted people in its uncounted shantytowns extend the limits of the city each day. Still, as New York is not America and Paris is not France, Mexico City is not Mexico either.

Milena and I decided to investigate a town a French-Italian woman artist who lived there part of the year had told us about: San Miguel de Allende, a tourist town four hours north of Mexico City. Before the reader scoffs at our choice, read further. We boarded a first-class, darkened, air-conditioned Flecha Amarilla bus headed north. The town looked right—church steeples and towers, red tile roofs, white and pastel-colored houses, green parks and gardens. A lake shimmered in the distance. Blue mountains lay to the west and canyons to the east. A block from the main square we found the kind of colonial hotel I had imagined. Since this was off-season, there was a wide choice of rooms and we finally took an apartment on the hotel roof overlooking the town. When evenings the sun fell toward the ridge of the mountains and dropped in a burst of flames before disappearing into nothingness I understood why the Indios worshipped it.

In those first days of discovery I liked to sit at the jardín, the park in the town center, and watch people and events. Toward evening when the Gringos stood up from the benches and began discussing restaurants for the evening, the Mexicans, as if according to a preordained plan, moved in unison from the shade of the trees in the park to places in the cooling sun. Two worlds occupy San Miguel, one Mexican, one gringo—two worlds apart, coexisting so peacefully in the same time and space that it made me feel guilty for the subterfuge and duplicity it conceals. Under the arches around the main plaza Mariachi bands hang around waiting for evening engagements. The men stand along the walls, divided in groups according to the colors of their suits, some smoking long cigars. So elegant. So mysterious. The sad-serious expressions on their faces seem like the masks of old Mexico. Milena loved the hundreds of buttons on the tight jackets and pants and the serapes thrown so casually over their shoulders against the cool nights. I think there is nothing more Mexican, nothing more lonely, than a serape.

Revolutionary leaders Gens. Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata (r), representing the northern and southern peasant armies. Treason would ambush both. Their greatness, despite continued efforts at tarnishment, grows with the passing of time.

At the same time my move to the old part of the New World reflected also my own search for myself. Something was missing and I hoped to find it in the ancient mystery of Mexico. I was searching for a new exile where I would become a new person. But to do that I had to discover that person or thing I felt in me. The mysterious thing dangling just out of reach, the thing whose presence I think everyone must feel but never recognize. It must have to do with who we are and where we come from, and also my conviction that we are more than Shakespeare’s “Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole and keep the wind away.”

At mid-day, the old town of San Miguel de Allende stands exposed as if at the summit of an Aztec temple. Father Sun is insidious. Beguilingly yellow, soft and warm, the sun hovers low for a few hours in the crisp morning before at noon its concentrated rays explode, violent, burning white. The fulgor of the tropical noonday sun is ambiguous. It burns black. For hours then the town lies helpless as if under a giant magnifying glass. Then after the damage has been done the sun slides toward the West, gradually at first, serenely, almost innocently, before in an instant plummeting behind the Sierra Madre in orange splendor leaving the Bajío Region in darkness.

Some people blame the sun for the generalized folly infecting San Miguelians—perhaps many Mexicans. The high sky over the great plateau of Mexico exudes stillness. Yet the repose of the heavens never descends to the dusty noisy earth to soothe people’s hearts. The dust of Mexico! The fearsome noises imprisoned within the town’s stone walls—gaseous cars and buses and bellowing motorcycles, construction echoes, barking dogs, fiesta music, fireworks, winds and rains—unite to crush mind and spirit. Old gods seem to have infused secret purposes in the hearts of its self-ostracized peoples. Playful and deadly Tezcatlipoca, Lord of the Here and Now, who places children in the womb of Mexican women, willed to them an atmosphere that slays thought and withers impulses of reaction to oppression.

Bogart, Huston and Tim Holt in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Written by a mysterious German emigré, B. Traven, and with a cast of Mexican and American stars, the story mirrors the way many foreigners have looked at Mexico: a land in which the law is often fragile and anything goes.

Afternoons, all kinds of people of San Miguel sit on the iron benches under the trees of the central plaza. The Gringos sit in the front row along the street facing the church towers—Texans, Yankees, Canadians and a few stray Europeans, engaged in looking at one another. Right over there is one with a long gray beard and hair bound in a pigtail wearing an off-shoulder Mexican shirt. And sitting on a low wall is a red-faced fat lady in a straw hat eating a huge cone of ice cream, sensually licking around the edges. And there are the predictable young blond tourists in jeans artificially torn at the knees, playing guitars and singing folk songs, largely ignored by the Mexicans sitting on the Town Hall side of the plaza and in the center under the trees around the bandstand. They too are watching one another—whites, various shades of mestizos and white, negro and white, negro and indigenous, migrants from Mexico City and Monterrey, from Guadalajara and Chihuahua, grandfathers and grandchildren, school girls in blue and white uniforms, street vendors, cowboys in white sombreros, policemen, and, at evening hours, the Mariachi. Each of the two distinct worlds lives against the background of the other, forever present, yet ignoring each other as if each were invisible to the other’s eyes. Purposeless peoples, exiled peoples, hounded and chased in search of asylum, and yet united by the shadow of past discontent, mistakes, misunderstandings, abuses, crimes, and now by the pigeons and stray dogs wandering indiscriminately under the feet of all, searching for a morsel of food here, or there, a careless caress.

Maria Felix, of Yaqui indian and Spanish descent, was the stuff that not only Mexican dreams are made of. For several decades she was rightly regarded as one of the most beautiful and distinctive actresses in the world. In 1946 she married the great Mexican composer Agustin Lara. Felix said of him that although he was not a handsome man, she was totally in love with him. She told her sister his music entranced her. During their one-year marriage, he composed some of his most beautiful songs, most of them inspired by her.

The town of San Miguel de Allende is five hundred years old. But the territory was long inhabited by peoples descended from the men who 30,000 years ago crossed the Bering Straits from Asia and filtered to the South. Men with Mongoloid features discovered today’s Mexico 21,000 years before Columbus by chance reached America. When the Genoese navigator arrived the peoples were not “Indians.” Instead, Otomí, then Nahoas, then Chichimecs—the latter name allegedly means “uncivil dirty dogs”—and Guachichils or “red-painted faces,” lived around today’s San Miguel de Allende. According to Spanish priests, “going naked, eating rats and snakes, worshipping pagan gods, and scalping the whites” who were pushing through their lands in search of gold and silver.

After time slowed, ironclad armies on horses and priests armed with the cross combined to discover the silver and, with boiling lead, to wash their civilizing religion down the throats of the indigenous peoples. The pax catholicus took root and the natives added Jesus Christ to their pantheon of gods. The Franciscan Juan de San Miguel founded the town of San Miguel in homage to his Patron Saint and dedicated his life to exhorting the native peoples to cooperation with their bloody conquerors: baptism was synonymous with civilization. The Friar wandered over the countryside singing the Franciscan canticle for the pleasure and edification of the “naked, pagan, rat-eating, Christian-scalping, uncivil dirty dogs of Chichimecs:”

Highest, Omnipotent, good Lord,

Praises, glory and honor and every blessing are Yours.

Praise be to You, my Lord, with all Your creatures,

Especially to Lord brother Sun,

Who is the day, which illuminates us.

Praise be to You, my Lord, for sister moon and the stars:

You created them bright, precious and beautiful in the heavens.

And so on and so on goes the canticle, for brother wind, for the air, the clouds, the sky, and all the weather, which sustains His creatures. For water, fire, the earth. At the end of the canticle come the bleakness and blackness new to the pagans:

Praise be to You, my Lord, for our sister, corporal death from which no mortal creature can escape.

Ay! for those who die in mortal sin!

Fortunate those who will be in Your Holy Will.

For the people the history of San Miguel was implacable. As the Spanish swarmed over the country more land went to the conquerors and less remained for the natives, until finally Spanish exploitation led to the uprising of future Mexicans. Mexico’s War of Independence was forged in the rich silver and agricultural territory around San Miguel. In 1810, the Grito, the Cry for Independence, resounded through New Spain from the nearby town of Dolores Hidalgo, and San Miguel de Allende became the cradle of the struggle.

Still, independence never resolved the ills of racism, exploitation, corruption, the system of latifundio whereby a few rich landlords owned vast rural properties, and the tradition of foreign intervention. In the turbulent Nineteenth century, French, American and “Allied” forces intervened repeatedly in Mexico but San Miguel remained silent and apart. So that finally, in 1910, with predictable unforeseenness in the Mexico that was already Third World, the explosion of the Great Revolution shook the country, seven years earlier than in Russia. The revolution rode on waves of revolt against the Old and dreams of the New as depicted in the murals of Diego Rivera, David Siquieros and Clemente Orozco.

But the long wide sweep of Mexico’s tragic history proved to be more powerful than its Great Revolution. The revolutionaries became tyrants and the revolution degenerated into a new tyranny. Old ills returned to haunt its heirs. Soon Mexico again languished under the rule of another oligarchy, described so vividly in Carlos Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz. The Great Revolution was put away in a museum and institutionalized in 1929 under corrupt one-party rule supported by police and military power and above all by its rapacious neighbor, the United States of America.

At the beginning of the new millennium reformists again sparked hopes for renewal for this country demographically the size of Italy and France together. If nothing of the Great Revolution remains, something is going on under the surface of social fabric that may reemerge as in recent years in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Venezuela, something enormous, something as gigantic and unstoppable as the winds sweeping down the Bajío.

Yet San Miguel de Allende is once again distant from change. History has passed it by. It is a long way to Mexico City from this conservative backwater territory still living in the shadow of its past of silver mines and water sparkling from natural springs. Of rich landlords and barefoot Indians scratching a living from barren earth. Of conservatives and imperialists who want Mexico to remain static and of poor illiterate half-castes and Indios who have no concept of changing times.

The only apparently normal ones are the poor Mexicans who serve the rich. Not only do the poor Mexicans live their lives against the background of the rich, amused and influenced by their follies, but each class depends on the other: Gringos and rich Mexicans simultaneously depend on the cheap labor and are the source of the livelihood of the poor. Though these peoples share the same sun and thin air and the winds and the rains and the pollution and the dust and the noise, in reality they are as different from one another as are the planets glittering above them.

GO TO PART TWO




TRIALOG: Is the Italian ruling class that much different?

PARTICIPANTS:  [print_link]

Gui Rochat, Contributing Editor, TGP

la_dolce_vita

Having lived in Rome and also having Italian family I can assure you that no class is as viciously opportunistic and closed to altruistic and compassionate ideas than the Italian bourgeoisie. The phenomenon of the rise and victory of the international bourgeoisie is that it reverts to feudalism in a totalitarian sense. Free trade is a misnomer because it is not free but regulated by the power blocs while deregulated in the rules for the producers and consumers. (quod licet Jovi non licet bovi). The descent into seduction and sex is not a feminine trait but a reverting to infantile poly-sensual liberation from a hellishly impersonal exploitation of labor and body. The United States never had a proletarian underclass till the industrial revolution and so slid into capitalism more easily than was possible in Western Europe. Therefore the breaking down of the so-called middle-classes in America (an entirely different entity than those same classes in Western Europe) is the present day only hope for a re-alignment of power down to the public, because the inner workings of the system are becoming [more] visible in economic stress. The pox of the media cannot even distort these facts.

Patrice:

Antonioni directing Monica Vitti, his prime diva.
Antonioni directing Monica Vitti, his prime diva and onetime companion.

was a breakthrough not only in cinematic esthetic but in the manner in which he mirrored the purposelessness at the core of the upper class existence. In the words of film critic G. Nowell-Smith:

What L’Avventura showed was that films do not have to be structured around major events, that very little drama can happen and a film can still be fascinating to its audience. It also showed-and this was harder for audiences to grasp-that events in films do not have to be, in an obvious way, meaningful. L’Avventura presents its characters behaving according to motivations unclear to themselves as much as to the audience; they are sensitive to mood, to landscape, to things that happen, but they also behave in routine and conformist ways. None of them, except Claudia (who had, in her words, “a sensible childhood…without any money”), seems to have much consciousness of the lack of direction that afflicts them. (Bold ours) They are, to use a word very fashionable at the time the film came out, alienated. But to say, as many critics did, that the film is “about” alienation is to miss the point. The film shows, it doesn’t argue. It convinces by the sensitivity and accuracy of its observation, not by heavy signals to the audience to think this, that, or the other.

Gui: Indeed Patrice, you are correct and this bourgeois phenomenon spreads to Spain as well (in fact they have their brilliant Luis Bunuel with his French co-production Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972) , but there one starts getting into French irony, which dulls the bite a bit with its wit. I remember in such fashion the French movie La Grande Bouffe, 1973 whereby the goal of the protagonists is to eat themselves to death, exposing the truth of consumerism as the thanatos urge to fill a spiritual vacuum (and his brother hypnos is the enforcer). The European bourgeois is in contrast to his American brethren an insecure person, because he had the task to keep the rabble in control and away from the ruling classes, while here the upper classes are just the much richer bourgeois. The pure impudence of the European ruling classes has traditionally identified them because they were quite secure until lately. The rappel a l’ordre which came in with Napoleon in France, made a re-entry of the aristo/plutocrats possible. In Italy the Risorgimento did not make such an adjustment necessary because the latifundia were mostly kept going till the end of Mussolinismo, after which the large new industrialists rescued the [old] elites by inter-marriage. The bourgeois elite in America is no less decadent, not because of Puritanism (that is left to the middle manager classes here), just less imaginative. That is also why a revolution in America is unthinkable, because everything here is refied and quantified, leaving no space for ‘imagined alternatives’. It restricts an understanding of older cultures and American perspectives remain within the operational mode, not affecting the soul and thus arid. All revolutions demand pathos and sturm und drang. Just try to apply that to the public here and you will see my point about the status quo.

Gaither: Maybe we use the word bourgeoisie too freely. Patrice’s “ruling class” strikes me as more apt. As Gui notes, the bourgeoisie in feudal France was something precise and identifiable. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of pre-revolutionary France: “For the first time perhaps since the beginning of the world one sees the upper classes so isolated and separated from all the rest that one can count their members and separate them as one separates the condemned part of the herd….” One cannot speak of such a specific class in crass Italy today. If it exists, it is as invisible as it is in modern France. Most certainly Italy’s former borghesia is no more in condition to control the ruling class headed by populist Silvio Berlusconi than it did Fascism. During the 1968 social upheaval and the subsequent period of home-made terrorism, the Italian radical Left was accustomed to the word. In those times one had in mind the socio-political meaning of borghesia, the morally corrupt class that Marxism equates with the capitalist or ruling class. While the former borghesia went into hiding, the capitalist ruling class took over, let’s say some thirty years ago, today highly visible, arrogant and pretentious, forever on display, in talk shows from morning to night, in Parliament, in chic restaurants, in their big boats. That new class has maintained the upper hand, crushing the other classes along the way. But no matter what tag we attach to the ruling class everywhere, the modern age is the epoch of the bourgeoisie, that is, of capitalism. Though in Italy the capitalist class is small, as in the USA, and the workers-wage wage earners in overwhelming majority, the wage earners not only do not rebel but are also accomplices in that they emulate and continue to vote for the crook Berlusconi. Meritocracy is a popular word among the ruling class in Italy. We see here a repetition of the former American dream. Rewards for obedience. Meritocracy and freedom, the freedom for the ruling capitalist class to exploit and accumulate. According to this new ruling class the unheard-of, inconceivable demand for social equality in 1968 changed the rules of the game. Now it wants its revenge. The manifest slogan is “Down with equality and brotherhood and up with more freedom for the ruling class.”

The European bourgeois is in contrast to his American brethren an insecure person, because he had the task to keep the rabble in control and away from the ruling classes, while here the upper classes are just the much richer bourgeois. The pure impudence of the European ruling classes has traditionally identified them because they were quite secure until lately. The rappel a l’ordre which came in with Napoleon in France, made a re-entry of the aristo/plutocrats possible. In Italy theRisorgimento did not make such an adjustment necessary because the latifundia were mostly kept going till the end of Mussolinismo, after which the large new industrialists rescued the [old] elites by inter-marriage. The bourgeois elite in America is no less decadent, not because of Puritanism (that is left to the middle manager classes here), just less imaginative.

If I read this correctly, Gui is implying, on one hand, that the European bourgeois/ruling class is/has been more insecure because Europeans, by and large, inherited and possess a higher level of political sophistication and stronger working class self-defense organizations, not to mention a far more robust revolutionary undercurrent (denied, lately, by the ascendancy of plutocrats like Sarkozy and Berlusconi), a threat American ruling circles do not have to contend with. At the same time, Gui also argues that until recently the same class, feeling quite secure, was well known for its impudence. Which way is it, then? Is the European bourgeois/upper class person really more insecure than his American counterpart and if so, how does such insecurity manifest itself?

Gui:

To respond to the reaction to my remark about the insecurity of European elites (and I do in fact differentiate between the bourgeois managerial classes, such as bankers, lawyers, politicians etc. and the elite, which are the true owners), the cleverest part of propaganda in the New World has been that with a little bit of luck everyone could become a Rockefeller or a Gates. This admiration of riches, not envy as in Europe, builds a cordon sanitairearound conspicuous consumption and its practitioners because it is dangled by the media as a desirable goal.Thus the American establishment is secure in its enclaves from an onslaught by the general public, a danger which remains in the subconscious of European elites dating as far back as the French revolt in 1789 and Russian one in 1917 as well as from the two world wars like Patrice correctly points out. Here the rich indulge in the theatre of the outrageous, a public spectacle of spendthrift nonchalance, but in Italy as far as I understand it from Gaither, they exhibit a personal game of glamour and exclusivity. American society has always been inclusive by repute, in other words one was perfectly free to proudly refuse Rockefeller’s dime but not to kick him in the shins.

The attitudes towards the establishment here are thoroughly different from those in Europe because the wealthy are buffeted by a system that enhances acquisition of private wealth whereas by now in many European societies a fairly socialist system is in place so that governments are held more responsible for their acts. And the American persona knows little irony in contrast to the ever wary European, thus what you see is what you get and consequently there is little contemplation, while the objectification of all human experience becomes a Taylor band of received ideas. It certainly makes for a domesticated environment because nothing will ever sway the persistent belief that with a little tinkering one can remedy all societal ills. Class conflicts safely become here cultural differences, because all strive is reduced to individual efforts for overcoming and sharing in the spoils. The isolation of the individual so apparent in capitalism where everyone is on his/her own and God for us all, is the means whereby the system is kept in place, because solidarity is a very precious and feared commodity and not salable…Maybe I am missing the point that Patrice makes about the insecurity that all elites and now visibly the American ones suffer under. But aside from the Civil War and that is debatable, American society has never been disturbed so deeply as the European societies have since about 1870. That was the date of the Paris commune which was very bloodily suppressed as it shook the foundations of the French republic. The Prussian state made sure that a reversal to order was imposed on North-Central Europe to avoid the nefarious influences of French socialist thinking. This has been a model followed by many a modern state (vide the article by Uri Avnery we reproduce elsewhere on this site) and we have to guard against it with every fiber possible. The prospects are not favorable however as long as the present shameless manipulation of the public remains in force.

Patrice:

Gui:

I am quite happy that others joined in to make this a “sexalogue” (not to be confused other than with ‘six’ in Latin…) and so on, because good feedback is important for Internet discussions. I am not all out of hope for a change of political direction within our life time in this country, exactly because the ground rules of the Constitution, though mostly trampled upon, are still in force and that is a basis which we need to build on. Even the phenomenon of Obama in continuation of an imperial presidency does not disturb me too much. After all he is part of the problem just like the majority of the Senate and the House. And it is slowly penetrating the public consciousness that there is something radically wrong about most legislation and the dictatorial executive. I do not entirely agree with Gore Vidal’s analysis of a future military dictatorship here. All humans are basically conservative and industrial capitalism has turned this country into a bourgeois society, where materialism has now reigned supreme for some one hundred and fifty years. Nevertheless individualism (though one can agree that it is entirely different here and less socially conscious than elsewhere) helps exactly through the fact of its isolation to create resistance to the usual social bondage. Although the falling apart of military discipline in Vietnam came about with conscription as many ‘undesirables’ were inducted, and the draft is therefore now strenuously avoided by the government, it is evident from the many terrible suicides again of soldiers that the soul cannot be suppressed. That already would give hope to those who want to end constant warfare, a condition which Empire needs to stay viable, otherwise its territories of ‘interest’ (read exploitation) will shrink. One may deplore China’s stance on pollution, but the simple fact that other countries resist the clout of the West is encouraging. Empire is slowly crumbling at the edges and who knows what sudden knock may make it keel over? There again the sum total of human suffering will remain constant as it has over the ages (let us say some five thousand years as the creationists would have it, but maybe John Zerzan is indeed correct that civilization is a curse to humankind). From history we know that the more outrageous the elites become, the more ‘clicks’ of sudden insight happen in people’s minds. So let them (the elites) eat cake till surfeit takes them out, helped maybe by a good nudge from the common rabble…

Patrice:

Gui, your notion that the extreme individualism we observe in America (albeit politically and intellectually barren) may be in the end an obstacle to a military dictatorship is worthy of deeper exploration. Is that on account of its inherent anarchistic strain? I have observed elsewhere that besides this unformulated anarchistic tendency in the American lore, there’s also the question of an American identity firmly rooted in exceptionalism, and the honoring of “democracy”, “freedom”, regular elections, and what not, the garments if not the substance of democracy. While the ruling class does not take these ideas, for the most part, in earnest, a pragmatic cynicism being their true default position when it comes to holding onto power…the masses do, consistent with their indoctrination. The political naivete of most Americans may trump attempts to impose an overt and heavy-handed dictatorship in this nation, after all. Ironically, the mind managers may have done their job much too well!

Gui:

Indeed, that seems to become the case, that the establishment will be choking on its own propaganda, after the public has become a one-mind mass, all believing the same factoids, like Trent and Patrice mention. After all the disillusionment with Obama’s propaganda from before January 2009, is palpable. And he did a good job to open up this split between his words and reality at Berlin, Cairo, Oslo and now in Copenhagen. These speeches were as usual meant for consumption at home, but like with geese, the force-feeding must be stopped at a certain moment, because you will kill the victim. I have been reading David Harvey’s superb article on Znet, but what he ignores (and I hope to comment on) is the poisoned mind in the West, which is fettered by the false consciousness imposed on it. And which is very tough to heal, because it is cleverly linked to the image of survival and nation hood and which only exhibits itself as fragile with incidents like the man attacking Berlusconi or for that matter the attacks on Kennedy and Reagan. Regicide does not clear up the system, because as history has shown, it is soon replaced by another dictator. How to liberate minds has become imperative and that is far from easy, despite the obvious scandals like the Wall Street give-away and crude efforts to scuttle any true health care reform. That is where the official propaganda starts to unravel, because the schism between lies and truth are widening. One can clearly hear it in the desperate outbursts from Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity and such as Bachman et alia, who serve as the loyal opposition to a fictional socialist president. There is truly no hiatus between an Obama and the hero Mcain, because both serve the same masters, albeit with different masks on.

Patrice:

Indeed, as you note, “regicide does not clear up the system, because as history has shown, it is soon replaced by another dictator.” And this is because the problem of a leader indifferent to the needs of the masses, or openly tyrannical, occurs not as an anomaly, an aberration that can be corrected by the mere replacement of the “usurper” with someone who might honor the rules of the system…which we assume to be kind and legitimate… but as a direct product of that system. That system in America’s case is of course capitalism in its last stages of social and historical decomposition, i.e., at its maximum toxicity to everything living. As Joel Kovel has said, capitalism is the enemy of nature.

Gaither:

berlusco.Hit
Berlusconi hit–deservedly (assuming the whole incident is true).

At the origin of this discussion was the query about the Italian ruling class and how, or if, it differs from the American ruling class. One of the first false ideas dispelled was that Italians and Europeans in general are more politically sophisticated than their American brothers. Agreement that they are not significantly different is progress. They are no less naive and mis- and uninformed. However it is important to recall, as do Patrice and Gui, the survival in Europe of the concept of an organized working class. I would add that the working class still cherishes its fundamental if not divine right to a decent life, and in case of default, on the part of some, as a last resort, revolt and finally revolution. That implies that the humanistic idea of solidarity (as differentiated from charity), absent in the USA, still hangs on in Italy/Europe, even if debilitated and undermined by the American idea of individualism, the self-made man, and the visibleness of the resulting vast spaces offered to the ruling capitalist class by real American “democracy.” Despite the weakening of class conflict in Europe, the “right” to opposition and mass manifestations is deeply entrenched. The “piazza” continues to be a political force to contend with. Even the Berlusconi government, with its whopping parliamentary majority, exercizes the right to mass demonstrations. The difference between ruling class use of the piazza in Italy and elsewhere is its populist nature inherent in Berlusconism, which means piazza per se.

Meanwhile the American self-made individual has not yet emerged as the paradigm in Europe, although the imitative drive knows no limits and thrives in all climates. The confusion of American “freedom” and individualism with anarchy in its broadest sense, though perhaps still on a back burner in Italy/Europe, grows to the extent that the Berlusconis and Sarkozys multiply and the emphasis on the superiority — with its permissiveness and concomitant limitations on authentic social freedoms– of “democracy” as a system widens, which includes the flag, the cross, school prayers and unrestrained circumvention of all social controls and rules by the European ruling class.

I might add that I am not convinced that regicide does not change things. The French and Russian revolutions are proof. Many people believe that the absence of Berlusconi would make a difference in Italy, as the hundeds if not thousands of Facebook entries demonstrate. Resistance to power is as a rule weak, the ruling class all-powerful and resourceful. The ruling class knows how to defend itself. Anything goes. As seen in myriad false flag operations and the entire strategy of terror used by all. On December 19, less than a week after the “attack” on Silvio Berlusconi on a tight piazza in Milano, I first heard the rumor, a rumor hidden within a telenewscast, then an 8-minute video on line, YouTube and Face Book, viewed by hundeds of thousands. Voices claim that like the Twin Towers of the WTC, the entire affair was arranged by the secret service, that the attacker was a hired plant, that Berlusconi only showed coagulated blood, not flowing bood as from a real fresh wound, and only after he had been pushed into his nearby car and sprayed with a substance resembling blood. The scene was to inflate his image as a martyr to the patria and savior of the homeland pointed toward regional elections in March, and furthermore an excuse to reduce freedom of speech on online social networks. Pravda Online noted morever the discrepancy between two photos after Berlusconi was hit: in one photo the blood was on the left side of his face, in another photo on the right. Maybe that was the mirror effect. Or perhaps someone smeared the blood from one side to the other. But for some people the reasonable doubt remains. Though his popularily rating rose to 55.9%, one-fourth of people considers Berlusconi a danger to the nation.

Patrice:

I thank Gaither for a terrific post. He–as usual–makes many compelling points, and I only wish the braindead American media explored, even for a moment, the possibility that the Berlusconi attack was indeed a fabrication, a provocation carefully planned and staged by the intelligence services (include the Americans in this) which, worldwide, are both pretorian guard, sicarii, and regular mafia soldiers all rolled into one in the service of the world plutocracy. Alex Cockburn once called the CIA the “capitalist intelligence agency,” and the moniker is apt, for that’s the first and only allegiance this sordid organization and its sisters recognize.

I have only one small point to amplify with Gaither, and that concerns his assertion that “regicide” always changes things. If by “regicide” we understand the replacement of a tyrant or formal king or emperor with a far more democratic regime_as it happened in the Russian and French revolutions, in the former taking the nation from feudal monarchy to socialism, and in the latter from feudalism to a bourgeois regime, I think the meaning holds. But if “regicide” implies only the changing of one face (or clique) for another within the same system (i.e., substituting Obama for Bush), then “regicide” accomplishes little or nothing. In sum, regicide cum social revolution —as expressed variously above–changes things, while without, it’s merely another twist in the old screw.

Gui:

Regicides are revolutionary propaganda, they do not change the roots of the problem and are almost always followed by other tyrants, vide the beheading of James II in England (a symbolic cutting off of the head of the nation) followed by Cromwell, the guillotining of Louis XVI and then Robespierre and later Napoleon and the execution of Nicolas II followed by Stalin. As for the Berlusconi attack, I doubt that it was a conspiracy as the man is so vain that not fare una bella figura would not figure in his self image. I was very impressed by Gaither’s analysis of the traces of individualism and solidarity in the good sense of the word, still remaining in Italy/Europe as I encounter that in young people when I am in Paris and their cynicism strikes me as mentally very healthy (if only that could be followed by politically under-nourished American students…). And I subscribe to the fact that the Bushes, Obamas, Sarkozys and Berlusconis are just the front men, the lackeys for the truly powerful who always hide behind a tough screen of obfuscation and let these characters do their bidding. This may be a naive stance of mine as Berlusconi by virtue of his control of the Italian media does belong to the vested interests. (And GWB and Sarkozy are bona fides high bourgeois). But press lords themselves have to abide by what they are allowed to print or have said on their networks. I am also a bit careful about conspiracies, because I do not see the one about 9/11 as a deliberate move by the US government but that theory as exceptionalism. Why doubt that a cadre of highly educated (lawyers, engineers) from Saudi Arabia could topple the World Trade Center by a clever ruse and simple tools… with clever strategic planning, and bring this very drastic attack about?